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Interrupting Violence With The Message'Don't Shoot'November 09, 2012 1:52 PM

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nonfiction history & society

Don't ShootOne Man, A Street

Fellowship, AndThe End of

Violence in Inner-

City America

by David M. Kennedy

Paperback, 305 pages

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This interview was originally broadcast on Nov.

1, 2011. Don't Shoot is now out in paperback.

In 1985, David M. Kennedy visited Nickerson

Gardens, a public housing complex in south-

central Los Angeles. It was the beginning of the

crack epidemic, and Nickerson Gardens was

located in what was then one of the most

dangerous neighborhoods in America.

"It was like watching time-lapse photography of

the end of the world," he says. "There were drug

crews on the corner, there were crack monsters

and heroin addicts wandering around. ... It was

fantastically, almost-impossibly-to-take-in awful."

Kennedy, a self-taught criminologist, had a

visceral reaction to Nickerson Gardens. In his memoir Don't Shoot, he

writes that he thought: "This is not OK. People should not have to live

like this. This is wrong. Somebody needs to do something."

Kennedy has devoted his career to reducing gang and drug-related

inner-city violence. He started going to drug markets all over the

United States, met with police officials and attorney generals, and

developed a program — first piloted in Boston — that dramatically

reduced youth homicide rates by as much as 66 percent. That

program, nicknamed the "Boston Miracle," has been implemented in

more than 70 cities nationwide.

Today, Kennedy directs the Center for Crime Prevention and Control

purchase

4/2/13 Interview: David Kennedy, Author of 'Don't Shoot' : NPR

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at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, but he still

regularly goes out into the field. The drug world he works in now, he

says, is a little better than the one in which he worked in 1985 — but

not by much.

"Still, it's almost inconceivably awful in almost all of its dimensions," he

tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "And no one likes to say this stuff out

loud, because it's impolitic, but the facts are the facts. You get this

kind of drug activity and violence only in historically distressed,

minority neighborhoods. And it is far worse in poor, distressed

African-American neighborhoods."

Those neighborhoods are also more likely to be deadly for African-

American men — and they're getting worse, says Kennedy, citing grim

statistics: Between 2000 and 2007, the gun homicide rate for black

men between the ages of 14-17 increased by 40 percent. The rate for

men over the age of 25 increased by 27 percent. In some

neighborhoods, 1 in 200 black men are murdered every year.

"This is where the worst open-air drug markets are all concentrated,"

he says. "And quite naturally, law enforcement pays an awful lot of

attention to those neighborhoods. ... And the shorthand that you get

from cops when you look at these communities is that they look at you

and say, 'There is no community left.' "

Courtesy of David M. Kennedy

i

But there are plenty of law-abiding residents in

these neighborhoods that have been overtaken

by drugs, says Kennedy. They outnumber the

gang members and drug dealers by significant

percentages.

"What matters is that these offenders are in the

communities in groups," he says. "They are in

gangs, they are in drug crews, they are in chaotic

groups. And those groups drive the action to a

shocking degree."

In Cincinnati, for example, there are about 60

defined gang groups with about 1,500 members.

"[The people] representing less than half a percentage point of the

city's population are associated with 75 percent of all of Cincinnati's

killings," he says. "And no matter where you go, that's the fact."

4/2/13 Interview: David Kennedy, Author of 'Don't Shoot' : NPR

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The national homicide rate is now about 4 per 100,000, but the

homicide rate for members of gangs and neighborhood turf groups is

dramatically higher: as many as 3,000 per 100,000 a year.

"It is incredibly dangerous," says Kennedy. "If you talk to these guys,

what they say is, 'I'm terrified ... I got shot ... My brother's dead ... I've

been shot at ... And they are trying to shoot me ...' That [is] their

everyday world."

Kennedy's homicide-reduction program, called Operation Ceasefire,

brought gang members into meetings with community members they

respected, social services representatives who could help them, and

law enforcement officials who told them that they didn't want to make

arrests — they wanted the gang members to stay alive, and that they

planned to aggressively target people who retaliated. The

interventions worked to reduce the homicide rates.

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"In city after city, what we see is you may have to

do it once or twice, but as soon as the streets

believe that that's what's going to happen, they

change," says Kennedy. "In the summer of 1996,

just a few months after we implemented this, the

streets had quieted down dramatically, and they

kept getting better."

A variation of Operation Ceasefire was also

implemented to shut down open-air drug markets.

Instead of arresting drug dealers, the police

officers and Kennedy set up meetings with drug

dealers — and their mothers.

"We said, 'Your son is at a turning point. He could

be arrested right this minute, but we don't want to

do that. We understand how much that damages

him and his community. There's going to be a

meeting in a week. Please come with your son to

the meeting,'" he says.

Nearly everybody came. In the meeting, the police

reiterated what they had said in previous

meetings with gang members: that they wanted

the drug dealers to stay alive and out of jail. They

also warned that the consequences of not

4/2/13 Interview: David Kennedy, Author of 'Don't Shoot' : NPR

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©2013 NPR

shutting down the drug markets would be severe. In High Point, N.C.,

where the program was piloted, the open-air drug market

disappeared.

"You do one of these meetings ... [and] you can break the cycle in

these neighborhoods literally overnight," he says. "All that craziness is

gone."

Programs that target specific geographic areas through car and

pedestrian stops may also stop crime, but they come at a cost, says

Kennedy.

"There's a profit and a loss side on the public safety balance sheet,"

he says. "And what we see in many places is that while you can bring

crime down by occupying the neighborhood and stopping everybody,

what you do in the process is lose that neighborhood. ... You fuel the

idea that the police are an occupying, inimical force in the

neighborhood. You play into these real and toxic racial memories

about what came before civil rights. And you can make it work in many

places, but you can't stop. You can't ever say, 'We've won. Things are

good. Things are stable,' because you have driven them into hiding."

But in High Point, N.C., where Kennedy piloted his cease-fire

program, talking directly to drug dealers appears to be working. He

recalls a conversation he overheard, shortly after the open-air markets

were shut down.

"You hear one kid say to the other, 'Are you getting a ride home?' and

the other kid said, 'No, I'm walking. Mom says it's OK now.' "